DDCDD

When to Cue, When to Discuss

We’re talking better ways to teach this spring, and in particular, I’m using February to highlight some concepts from Nick Winkleman’s essential book: The Language of Coaching.

Some posts from this month include:

No Feedback, Only Cueing
Cueing Doubles
Goal-Intention-Cue
99 External Cues (Part 1)

In this post, I’ll go over Nick Winkleman’s Coaching Loop, which he describes as:

Describe - Demonstrate - Cue - Do - Debrief

I touched on this briefly in previous articles, but this loop helps put Cueing in context. In particular, understanding this Coaching Loop helps us understand where to use the External Cues and where we can blather on in an undisciplined way use more internal, body-oriented descriptions to help an athlete gain understanding of an area of the game.

Describe It, Demo It

At some point, you have to introduce a concept. Your player has never really passed a ball before. Or they’ve never used a particular way of angling their platform. Or they’ve never been in a system where the serve receive seam responsibilities were defined in a particular way. Etc. Beginner players get new things introduced to them on a daily basis. Even advanced players get introduced to new concepts.

I don’t want to spend a ton of time on these two concepts, because, as we’ll see in a minute, we’re eventually going to blend Describe and Demo into Debrief when we start Short Looping it.

But you want to introduce a concept. “Hey, last practice we worked on passing a ball that was served right at us. Today we’re going to work on a ball served on our outside shoulder. Here’s some things you’ll want to know about that.”

Then you want to demonstrate a concept. I’ll go deeper into best practices for demos in a future article. The demo can be done by a coach, by another player, or off video.

The point is that your players can understand what you’re talking about and form a picture in their mind. And you can point out body parts to your heart’s content here.

“See how her right shoulder is down so she can angle back to the court?”

“Get your left foot to the 3m line on this step.”

“If your hands are facing here, the ball is going to end up going over there.”

And so on. We don’t want to overdo it, but we can point out some details here.

Cue It And Do It

At some point you have to stop talking and get on the court. To transition between Describe/Demo and Cue/Do, introduce 1 or 2 important cues.

So you might Describe what the feet and shoulders do as you discuss a particular way to angle the pass, pointing out a few different details, etc. But as you finish, you’ll end with a cue, something like:

“Alright, so remember, you want to finish your angle back to target… or you can just think, 'angle back to target.”

This puts the Cue that you want players to think about and you want to repeat: “Angle back to target.” That’s the change.

Debrief/Discuss

Winkleman uses the term Debrief and I feel like I end up using Discuss a bit more, because that’s a more familiar word for most teenagers. But after we’ve introduced a concept with a Description, shown it with a Demonstration, and they Cue It and Do It, we can enter the Short Loop.

You’re not going to re-demo a concept every single time you practice it. Your 20 year-old college players (hopefully) know what you mean when you say, “crossover-3 block move,” or whatever term that’s part of your system. Enter the Short Loop:

Describe - Demonstrate - Cue - Do - Discuss - Cue - Do - Discuss - Cue - Do - Discuss - Cue - Do - Discuss - Cue - Do - Discuss

After a concept has been introduced, you just enter the never-ending Cue - Do - Discuss loop. The discussion is going to include Descriptions (of different aspects of that area of the game) and Demonstrations (video, etc) as well as conversation from the athlete to check for understanding and get their thoughts and opinions. That’s what I mean when I say that the Describe and Demo steps eventually just get blended in.

The point is that we now have a clear delineation process for both Cues and Descriptions as well as External and Internal language.

Cues should be short, familiar, and externally-focused.

Discussions can be short or long, can refresh familiar concepts or introduce new ones, and can include both internal and external language.

Most importantly: Discussions are an opportunity to create new Cues to help the athlete properly focus her mind on the task at hand.

If you read Goal - Intention - Cue you can probably see the connections here. This suggests a dynamic feedback loop between player, coach, and task that can change and adapt as an athlete progresses (or fails to progress) while allowing an athlete to enter each practice with a clear mind.

A Discussion might sound like this:

Coach: “Alright, you had the goal of being aced less than 10% of the time in serve receive. This past competition you got aced 7 times on 62 receptions. So you’re close.”

Athlete: (nods) “Yeah, I can feel that I’ve improved, but I know I can do better.”

Coach: “What have you been thinking about in serve receive?”

Athlete: “The last few practices I’ve been trying to think ‘track through the ball,’ and that’s been good… it just feels like there’s still some balls I’m shanking.”

Coach: “Okay let’s watch some video of those passes and see what we notice.”

(Coach and Athlete watch video of the 7 aces)

Coach: “What did you notice?”

Athlete: “On almost all of them I was getting caught high on the sides and I shanked it.”

Coach: “I saw that too… were you not seeing them right, or were they just coming off your arms wrong?”

Athlete: “No, I knew they were deep, it just seemed to bounce off my arms wrong. It was really frustrating.”

Coach: “I wonder if we can modify that ‘track through the ball’ cue to help you more with that…”¹

Athlete: “Yeah… I just can’t let it get past me like that.”

Coach: “Tracking seems to be helping… so what about changing ‘through’ to something else… ‘behind’… ‘over’… ‘around’… ‘on top of’…”

Athlete: “I like ‘track over the ball,” that feels like I would keep the ball going forward and not skip off my platform.”

Coach: “Okay, let’s try that tomorrow at practice.”

(Coach and Athlete high-five as 80s music plays and the screen fades to black.)

Hey, I said it might sound like that. Not all Discussions go so smooth, but that’s the goal. If your athlete is more lost than this, you might be biting off too much. Start smaller, get them a little piece that they have their head wrapped around and you can give them some specific cueing.

Give this a shot and let me know what you think.

1. Yes, yes, some MI bleeding in here :)